Jens Stoltenberg, the country's prime minister, was stranded Friday with thousands of other fliers at Kennedy Airport by a huge black cloud of volcanic ash that turned the skies over a large swath of Europe into a no-fly zone.

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But that didn't prevent Stoltenberg from conducting the daily business of Norwegian government on Apple's newest gizmo in an airport lounge.

Nearby, British Airways passengers were fuming about the lack of information and complaining about shabby treatment.

"It's rubbish," said 44-year-old Sasha Watson, who was trying to get a flight home to London with her two kids and mother.

"They haven't given us a meal voucher, said nothing about a hotel, and the only flights are going to Glasgow -- and that's hours from now."

"I know it's out of the airline's control, but we haven't been given adequate information," added Brian Jones, 48, a London teacher who had been celebrating his 25th wedding anniversary in New York with wife Sara, 47.

"We just want to go home to see our children."

Stoltenberg was later able to catch an overnight flight to Spain. In his latest Tweets, the intrepid PM reported he was riding in a car through southern Germany bound for a train that would get him closer to home.

Kaczynski, his wife, and much of his government, was wiped out last Saturday when their plane crashed in a Russian forest.

They were on their way to commemorate the murder of more than 20,000 Polish officers by Stalin's henchmen in the Katyn Forest during World War II.

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Now Mother Nature appeared to be conspiring against the unlucky Poles, who were forced by Cold War politics to wait more than half a century for the Soviets to own up to the massacre.

The Polish government insisted the funeral was still on and the White House said the President was still planning to fly to Poland.

The skies began turning black on Wednesday when a volcano beneath an Icelandic glacier erupted and spewed a gargantuan cloud of black basalt that blocked the main flight paths between the U.S. and Europe.

By Friday, the arc of grounded aircraft widened across Europe as thousands of planes stayed on the tarmac to avoid the hazardous cloud. Britain, Ireland, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Belgium closed their airspace and 60% of all European flights were cancelled.

"We expect around 11,000 flights to take place today in European airspace," said Eurocontrol spokeswoman Kyla Evans. "On a normal day, we would expect 28,000.

The cloud of volcanic ash is continuing to move east and southeast." Nothing was flying in or out of Europe's two busiest airports - Heathrow in London and Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.

And just 20 trans-Atlantic flights reached other European airports Friday morning, compared to 300 on a normal day, according to Eurocontrol.